How Batwoman's Big Decision Fits Into the History of Gay Superheroes [Spoilers]

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How Batwoman's Big Decision Fits Into the History of Gay Superheroes [Spoilers]

Image: DC Comics

Spoilers for the new issue of Batwoman follow.

In *Batwoman *#17, available from DC Comics in print and digital versions today, the openly gay heroine Batwoman (aka Katherine “Kate” Kane) proposes to her girlfriend, police detective Maggie Sawyer. While we don't yet know the answer, if all goes well they'll presumably be getting hitched, bringing same-sex marriage squarely into the center of a mainstream comic.

Granted, this isn't the first same-sex proposal in mainstream superhero comics; most recently, the Marvel Comics superhero Northstar – one of the first openly gay males in superhero comics – proposed to his boyfriend in an X-Men comic published last May, and married him in the subsequent issue.

But Batwoman's proposal also comes at a time when Batwoman publisher DC Comics is taking heat from comics fans for another LGBTQ issue: the hiring of noted homophobe Orson Scott Card as the writer of an upcoming Superman story. The decision to hire Card, who is on the board of the National Organization of Marriage (NOM), drew fire last week from LGBTQ rights supporters, who started a petition to have him dropped by DC, which has currently garnered nearly 14,000 online signatures thus far.

While All Out co-founder Andre Banks, who started the petition, declared that "[superheroes] are a reflection of our values and they deeply influence our shared ideals," the official comment from DC was that “the personal views of individuals associated with DC Comics are just that — personal views — and not those of the company itself.” Basically, it was a mess, but not a terribly surprising one given the long, uneven history of gay issues in superhero titles.

"In the last ten if not twenty years, we have seen more characters who are identified as queer in mainstream comics," Batwoman co-creator Greg Rucka told Wired. "[But] I feel very strongly that it's been two steps forward and one step back. Are we making progress? Yes. But it's not satisfactory in any way shape or form."

>'I feel very strongly that it's been two steps forward and one step back. Are we making progress? Yes. But it's not satisfactory in any way shape or form.'

writer Greg Rucka

For most of superhero history, the love that dare not speak its name was, well, not really spoken about much. This was thanks in part to the moral panic instigated by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham in his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, which detailed the many ways comic books were turning young people into delinquents (delinquents, I say!). In particular, it argued that "only someone ignorant of the fundamentals of psychiatry and of the psychopathology of sex can fail to realize a subtle atmosphere of homoeroticism which pervades the adventures of the mature 'Batman' and his young friend Robin."

Although recent academic criticism suggests that Wertham's research may have been flawed or even falsified, it was extremely influential at the time, leading to the Kefauver Senate hearings on juvenile delinquency as well as the Comics Code Authority, a self-censoring body created by comics publishers that ended up stultifying mainstream comics for decades.

As for Batman, he got Batwoman. She was fabulous, carried a cute purse full of Bat-lipstick, wore fantastic outfits, and (ironically, given today's news) reassured readers that absolutely nothing gay was happening in world of Batman comics. Meanwhile, the Comics Code prohibition against "sex perversion" made it clear that there was no room for LGBTQ characters in the world of mainstream comics.

Of course, the Comics Code didn't affect underground comics and other illustrated works – from Tom of Finland's erotic art to Dyke Shorts in the 1970s to Gay Comix in the '80s and '90s. There were even relatively popular comic strips like Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For, which ran from the 80s through the 2000s in alternative newspapers and was once speculated by The New York Times to be as important to new generations of lesbians as landmark novels like Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) and Lisa Alther’s Kinflicks (1976) were to an earlier one." (There is also the phenomenon of Japanese "yaoi" or "Boys' Love" comics, which are homoerotic works targeted at women, but that's another story.)

But the emergence of more openly queer characters like Batwoman into the world of mainstream comics is still a new phenomenon particularly in an industry where the Comics Code persisted into the '00s at the biggest publishers (although it was revised in 1989 to permit homosexuality).

"The biggest question on panels about gay comics over the past ten years has been 'How did you get that story done?' or 'What was the editorial response like?' and there was so much concern about whether this representation was going to be allowed to happen," said Charles "Zan" Christensen, who founded the non-profit publisher Prism Comics in 2003 to increase LGBTQ presence and visibility in comics. "Now it's so different. Every time somebody asks a question about how you get a character past editorial or a story past editorial the answer is almost invariably, 'Why would it be a problem?'"

Still, others feel that the progress hasn't come quite fast enough, and that compared to media that have made big strides to include LGBTQ characters, comics hasn't kept pace.

"I think comics are catching up with other media like TV and movies, and I think they're catching up in the way mainstream comics always have: they're the last to do it," said Rucka. "Superhero comics are an extraordinarily conservative medium because of the persistent [Fredric] Wertham effect of *won't somebody think of the children? *And when I say that it's a conservative medium, it is paradoxically conservative. It's not necessarily politically so, but it's bound by its history."

Dorian Wright, a noted blogger on gay issues in comics and co-author of *Write More Good *told Wired that "there are a lot of writers who want to be inclusive and want to do well by gay characters and fans, but they're writing for a medium that's been focused almost exclusively on straight white male characters for nearly the entire time it's been in existence. So they repeat bad clichés and tired old stereotypes that novels, film and television have mostly moved beyond."

Still, having Kate Kane propose to Maggie Sawyer in a genre that has only acknowledged gay characters in the last few decades is still what Joe Biden might call a BFD, almost by merit of that history. Yes, Orson Scott Card is writing a Superman story, but the arc of the moral universe is long, and it bends towards justice, if not the Justice League. And if superhero comics can handle gay marriage without their universe imploding, then perhaps other historically conservative corners of the cultural spectrum can too.

Kate Kane may be one of the very few queer characters gracing the pages of superhero books, but she's there and she's trying to put a ring on it. Mazel tov, Batwoman. It's been a long time coming.